When we en­counter un­sa­vory fea­tures of re­al­ity, it can be tempt­ing to look away. In­stead, we should ask, “What pur­pose does this serve?”

With this in mind, let’s look at bu­reau­cra­cies. Some peo­ple fear bu­reau­cra­cies; they fear “the Ma­chine.” Others are both­ered by the bu­reau­cra­cies ’ ap­par­ent dys­func­tion. With a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of bu­reau­cra­cies — what they are, why they’re here, and how they work — both of these re­sponses evap­o­rate, be­cause the re­al­ity is this: bu­reau­cra­cies aren’t al­to­gether bad. In fact, bu­reau­cra­cies can be in­cred­ibly use­ful.

What is a bu­reau­cracy?

A bu­reau­cracy is an au­to­mated sys­tem of peo­ple cre­ated to ac­com­plish a goal. It’s a mech suit com­posed of peo­ple. The owner of a bu­reau­cracy, if an owner ex­ists, is the per­son who can effec­tively shape the bu­reau­cracy. Bureau­crats are peo­ple who are part of a bu­reau­cracy (ex­clud­ing the owner).

Not all or­ga­ni­za­tions are bu­reau­cra­cies. Most or­ga­ni­za­tions are mixed — they have both bu­reau­cratic and non-bu­reau­cratic el­e­ments.

The Pur­pose of Bureaucracies

The pur­pose of a bu­reau­cracy is to save the time of a com­pe­tent per­son. Put an­other way: to save time, some com­pe­tent peo­ple will cre­ate a sys­tem that is meant to do ex­actly what they want — noth­ing more and noth­ing less. In par­tic­u­lar, it’s nec­es­sary to cre­ate a bu­reau­cracy when you are both (a) try­ing to do some­thing that you do not have the ca­pac­ity to do on your own, and (b) un­able to find a com­pe­tent, al­igned per­son to han­dle the pro­ject for you. Bureau­cra­cies ame­lio­rate the prob­lem of tal­ent and al­ign­ment scarcity.

Fea­tures of Bureaucracies

Bureau­crats are ex­pected to act ac­cord­ing to a script, or a set of pro­ce­dures — and that’s it.

Own­ers don’t trust that bu­reau­crats will be com­pe­tent or al­igned enough to act in line with the owner’s wishes of their own ac­cord. Given this lack of trust, own­ers should be try­ing to dis­em­power bu­reau­crats. Bureau­cra­cies are built to al­ign peo­ple and make them suffi­ciently com­pe­tent by chain­ing them with rules. When bu­reau­cra­cies de­liber­ately re­strict in­no­va­tion, they are do­ing it for good rea­son.

Bureau­crats are meant to have only bor­rowed power (power that can eas­ily be taken away) given to them by the owner or op­er­a­tor of the bu­reau­cracy.

Effec­tive Bureaucracies

What is an effec­tive, owned bu­reau­cracy? Why are effec­tive bu­reau­cra­cies owned? To be­gin, we must make two im­por­tant dis­tinc­tions: one be­tween owned and aban­doned bu­reau­cra­cies, and one be­tween effec­tive and in­effec­tive bu­reau­cra­cies.

Owned bu­reau­cra­cies are bu­reau­cra­cies with an owner; they’re bu­reau­cra­cies that some­one can shape. Aban­doned bu­reau­cra­cies are bu­reau­cra­cies with­out an owner.

If a bu­reau­cracy is owned, the bu­reau­cracy’s cre­ator is likely the owner. The cre­ator will have knowl­edge about the setup of the bu­reau­cracy that is nec­es­sary for prop­erly re­form­ing it. Others, un­less given this in­for­ma­tion, will not un­der­stand the bu­reau­cracy well enough to prop­erly re­form it.

The per­son tech­ni­cally in charge of the bu­reau­cracy (e.g. the C.E.O. of a com­pany who is not its founder) might not be its owner sim­ply be­cause he or she doesn’t have suffi­cient in­for­ma­tion about the bu­reau­cracy’s setup to guide it. As a re­sult, the offi­cial head of a given bu­reau­cracy may just be an­other bu­reau­crat.

While the owner is typ­i­cally the cre­ator, this needn’t be true, as long as the new owner has come to un­der­stand enough of the func­tion of the bu­reau­cracy to make effec­tive adap­ta­tions to its pro­ce­dures.

Effec­tive bu­reau­cra­cies are bu­reau­cra­cies that are han­dling the pro­ject they were cre­ated to han­dle. Ineffec­tive bu­reau­cra­cies are bu­reau­cra­cies that are not han­dling the pro­ject they were cre­ated to han­dle.

Bureau­cra­cies that are prop­erly set up will be effec­tive at the start. Changes in re­al­ity re­quire changes in pro­ce­dures, how­ever, so a bu­reau­cracy’s pro­ce­dures in­evitably need to be al­tered ap­pro­pri­ately for it to re­main effec­tive. Over time, aban­doned bu­reau­cra­cies, hav­ing no per­son who can func­tion­ally shape the bu­reau­cracy to make these changes, quickly be­come in­effec­tive bu­reau­cra­cies.

Owned bu­reau­cra­cies, on the other hand, have a shot at mak­ing these adap­ta­tions to pre­vent de­cay. If the owner is skil­led, the bu­reau­cracy’s pro­ce­dures can be mod­ified, and the bu­reau­cracy will con­tinue serv­ing its origi­nal pur­pose. If the owner is un­skil­led, it is as if the bu­reau­cracy is aban­doned — the owner’s efforts to change the bu­reau­cracy’s strate­gies won’t yield suc­cess­ful adap­ta­tion, and the bu­reau­cracy will be­come in­effec­tive. As a re­sult, for a bu­reau­cracy to re­main effec­tive over time, it must be an owned, not aban­doned, bu­reau­cracy with a suffi­ciently ca­pa­ble owner.

Los­ing and Dis­man­tling Bureaucracies

Bureau­cra­cies are best thought of as an ex­ten­sion of their cre­ator and as a source of power for him or her. How­ever, the owner can lose con­trol of the bu­reau­cracy over time, as bu­reau­crats con­vert bor­rowed power into owned power by ex­ploit­ing in­for­ma­tion asym­me­tries. While own­ers will try to limit the owned power of their bu­reau­crats, the bu­reau­crats will have more than enough time to study the in­stru­ments of their con­trol and will learn what is re­warded and what isn’t.

Imag­ine a bu­reau­crat that is sup­posed to be an as­sis­tant to the ab­sen­tee owner of an in­sti­tu­tion. This se­nior as­sis­tant is sup­posed to re­search solu­tions to key prob­lems, and then pre­sent sev­eral op­tions to the owner, who then se­lects one. The as­sis­tant is then re­quired to im­ple­ment the one that was cho­sen. There is a very de­tailed doc­u­ment de­scribing their job and re­quire­ments at ev­ery step of this pro­cess.

The key prob­lem is that a very com­plex set of rules can be eas­ily bent to ac­quire an ar­bi­trary out­come. The out­come will be com­pletely valid from the rule set. This is analo­gous to how in sci­ence a very com­plex model, that fits the data, is not very im­pres­sive. As Von Neu­mann put it: “With four pa­ram­e­ters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wig­gle his trunk.” Let’s walk through the de­scribed pro­cess the se­nior as­sis­tant is sup­posed to fol­low to demon­strate how bu­reau­crats wig­gle their trunks.

You might re­quire the as­sis­tant to not en­gage in origi­nal re­search, but rather work as a search en­g­ine through more ob­jec­tive aca­demic liter­a­ture or best prac­tices in a par­tic­u­lar in­dus­try. The as­sis­tant, how­ever, can cherry pick seem­ingly ob­jec­tive aca­demic pa­pers to ar­gue for their preferred policy out­come. It is ac­tu­ally much eas­ier to start with a pre­con­ceived opinion and then find work con­firm­ing it, rather than re­view a liter­a­ture as a whole. The plau­si­bil­ity of this short­cut should be in­ti­mately fa­mil­iar to any uni­ver­sity stu­dent who worked un­der the pres­sure a dead­line for a class pa­per they didn’t much care about.

The chief as­sis­tant can craft sev­eral op­tions. They can make op­tion B, their fa­vorite, the most ap­peal­ing, and crip­ple op­tions A and op­tions C. Maybe even in­clude point 14, their core agenda, into all three pro­pos­als that vary on points 1 to 13 they don’t much care about. What­ever the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the se­lected solu­tion is, the let­ter of the law can be bent and eas­ily di­verge from the spirit of the law.

In such a cir­cum­stance, an owner can lose con­trol of the bu­reau­cracy and the power that comes with it.

It is of­ten benefi­cial for own­ers to dis­man­tle bu­reau­cra­cies af­ter they have served their pur­pose to avoid los­ing own­er­ship of them due to these in­for­ma­tion asym­me­tries. Bureau­cra­cies of this type might grow to be in­de­pen­dent pow­ers that in­terfere with your plans.

Aban­doned bu­reau­cra­cies might also be vi­able tar­gets for out­side takeover. Such takeovers can be a se­ri­ous prob­lem if un­der­taken by your op­po­si­tion. Bureau­cra­cies nearly always carry a heavy legacy doc­u­ment foot­print; when ex­am­ined this foot­print can not only pro­duce, but also be used to carry out le­gal at­tacks. If the in­sti­tu­tion is vested with an au­thor­ity or rep­u­ta­tion, this can also be turned against you.

If it is too hard to re­gain own­er­ship, dis­man­tling the in­sti­tu­tion for re­sources may be the best op­tion. Th­ese re­sources might be quite eas­ily quan­tifi­able, such as use of real es­tate or key em­ploy­ees. They might also be less tan­gible, such as the at­ten­tion of your al­lies. Un­less you for­mally re­tire a ve­hi­cle, these al­lies might mis­tak­enly be­lieve it ac­tive, caus­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion is­sues or mi­s­un­der­stand­ings of your key pri­ori­ties.

In short, when han­dling mul­ti­ple or­ga­ni­za­tions ty­ing up loose ends be­comes very im­por­tant.

How to ac­com­plish tasks in an in­sti­tu­tional landscape

Build­ing a bu­reau­cracy is an effec­tive way to ac­com­plish your goals un­der the right cir­cum­stances, but it’s not the best op­tion. In or­der of effec­tive­ness, here are gen­eral op­tions for get­ting things done:

Delegate

If you can find a com­pe­tent, al­igned per­son who will do the pro­ject in ques­tion for you — let’s call them a del­e­gate — then let them. This per­son can cre­ate a bu­reau­cracy for you, if nec­es­sary, as pro­jects of a cer­tain scale will re­quire bu­reau­cra­ti­za­tion. Un­for­tu­nately, be­cause of the harsh tal­ent and al­ign­ment scarcity men­tioned ear­lier, find­ing del­e­gates can be challeng­ing. Fur­ther­more, cor­rectly as­sess­ing whether some­one is a wor­thy del­e­gate takes skill. Fre­quently peo­ple will ac­ci­den­tally del­e­gate a pro­ject to some­one who is in­suffi­ciently com­pe­tent or al­igned. Failed del­e­ga­tion is worse than build­ing your own bu­reau­cracy, be­cause it will lead to pro­ject failure.

If you have ac­cess to a del­e­gate, don’t treat them like a bu­reau­crat. This wastes a valuable re­source: a del­e­gate can perform tasks you didn’t know needed do­ing and build al­igned sys­tems be­yond your de­sign, a bu­reau­crat can­not.

Fur­ther such treat­ment in­vites dis­al­ign­ment with your del­e­gate. It isn’t just a mat­ter of in­ter­per­sonal grace and re­spect, so it can­not be over­come with kindly man­age­ment; rather if you are at­tempt­ing to closely pro­ce­du­ral­ize the ac­tions of a com­pe­tent del­e­gate, they might ac­cu­rately con­clude the best way to perform their job is to at­tempt to by­pass your con­trol. If you picked them well, they will be rather effec­tive in do­ing so. They don’t need a script — if they’re com­pe­tent enough for your pur­poses, they’ll be able to figure out how to do the pro­ject.

Bureaucratize

If you can’t find a del­e­gate, then build­ing your own bu­reau­cracy (even if it’s small) is the best bet. Bureau­cra­tiz­ing some things and not oth­ers, on the ba­sis of whether the task can be pro­ce­du­ral­ized, is typ­i­cally more effec­tive than bu­reau­cra­tiz­ing ev­ery­thing by de­fault. Figure out when us­ing an au­to­mated sys­tem is the best op­tion.

Do it yourself

While do­ing it your­self may be most likely to re­sult in a well run pro­ject, it is not always fea­si­ble — you have limited time and ca­pac­ity. Without del­e­gates or bu­reau­cra­cies, the am­bi­tious­ness of the pro­jects you can suc­cess­fully ex­e­cute will be bounded.

Don’t do it

Some things, though use­ful, aren’t worth do­ing…

Un­der­stand­ing the World Around You

Assess­ing People

An un­der­stand­ing of bu­reau­cra­cies lets you an­a­lyze a given per­son’s power: is some­one act­ing as a del­e­gate or a bu­reau­crat? Is some­one cre­at­ing del­e­gates or bu­reau­crats? If some­one has cre­ated a bu­reau­cracy, do they un­der­stand the func­tion of bu­reau­cra­cies? Do they own their bu­reau­cracy, or is it aban­doned? If they own their bu­reau­cracy, is it effec­tive or in­effec­tive? Are they cre­at­ing bu­reau­cra­cies un­der the right con­di­tions? What is the role of bu­reau­cra­cies in their plan?

If a per­son is pow­er­ful, what does it mean if he’s cre­ated many bu­reau­cra­cies? In some cases, the cre­ation of many bu­reau­cra­cies in­di­cates the owner is ex­tremely good at build­ing au­to­mated sys­tems. Alter­nately, he might have trou­ble del­e­gat­ing — per­haps be­cause he can’t find com­pe­tent, al­igned peo­ple, or be­cause he can’t as­sess peo­ple well. Peo­ple who can work well with oth­ers and have ac­cess to suffi­ciently tal­ented al­igned peo­ple need fewer bu­reau­cra­cies. In­stead, they’ll del­e­gate to oth­ers, who can ei­ther do the pro­ject them­selves or cre­ate a bu­reau­cracy of their own.

On the other hand, if a per­son is pow­er­ful, what does it mean if he’s cre­ated few or no bu­reau­cra­cies? If he isn’t del­e­gat­ing, it means that he’s do­ing ev­ery­thing him­self and pos­si­bly doesn’t know how to de­sign au­to­mated sys­tems. If he is del­e­gat­ing, he’s likely to be good enough at find­ing com­pe­tent, al­igned peo­ple that he doesn’t need a bu­reau­cracy. Pow­er­ful peo­ple who don’t cre­ate bu­reau­cra­cies can be just as pow­er­ful as peo­ple who do.

Assess­ing Organizations

The frame­work can be ap­plied to eval­u­at­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions. For a given or­ga­ni­za­tion, be­gin by ask­ing if it’s a bu­reau­cracy. If it is, ex­pect it to be­have in highly stereo­typed ways, it will not be very adap­tive to new challenges and will not ac­cu­rately eval­u­ate things out­side the as­sumed on­tol­ogy of its pa­per­work and in­ter­nal di­vi­sion of la­bor.

If it’s a bu­reau­cracy, we can ask: is it an owned or aban­doned bu­reau­cracy? If it is owned, ex­pect that a large enough challenge will even­tu­ally cause it to re­or­ga­nize. You’ll also be able to reach out to the owner to re­solve prob­lems or find a way to co­op­er­ate that the bu­reau­cracy it­self doesn’t un­der­stand.

Is it an effec­tive or in­effec­tive bu­reau­cracy? If it is effec­tive, you can rely on the in­ter­face it offers you to achieve the goal it claims to achieve. Ineffec­tive ones will provide a some­times be­wil­der­ing ser­vice that might only tan­gen­tially be re­lated to their efforts.

Re­mem­ber that not all or­ga­ni­za­tions are bu­reau­cra­cies.

Some non-bu­reau­cratic in­sti­tu­tions will have to pre­tend they are bu­reau­cra­cies on pa­per for le­gal com­pli­ance. This is an ex­am­ple of a more gen­eral prin­ci­ple: in­de­pen­dent or­ga­ni­za­tions in­ter­pret ex­ter­nally im­posed reg­u­la­tion as dam­age, and route around it.

Or­ga­ni­za­tions can be tightly co­or­di­nated groups the fea­ture a lot of del­e­ga­tion and defer­ence. In these, ex­pect adap­tive be­hav­ior; the on­tol­ogy they are work­ing in might rapidly change to re­spond to ei­ther your challenge or offer of co­op­er­a­tion. Most im­por­tantly there will be in­di­vi­d­u­als be­yond merely the leader who can ex­er­cise their own judge­ment.

Effec­tively In­ter­act­ing with Ex­ist­ing Organizations

If an or­ga­ni­za­tion is not a bu­reau­cracy but rather a tightly co­or­di­nated group, talk to the del­e­gates if you want to get things done; they will have free­dom to act com­pe­tently within their own do­main and will be eas­ier to reach than lead­er­ship.

The key ad­van­tage of talk­ing to peo­ple over en­gag­ing with au­to­mated sys­tems is that you can bring con­sid­er­a­tions from out­side their im­me­di­ate in­sti­tu­tional con­text into con­sid­er­a­tion. While the lo­cal bal­ance of power might still be in the way of such con­sid­er­a­tions, it is sur­pris­ingly of­ten vi­able to have them taken into ac­count.

If it’s a bu­reau­cracy, you can ei­ther (1) go along with it, (2) figure out how to by­pass it, or (3) co­or­di­nate with its owner, if it is owned. You may pre­fer to by­pass (or game) the bu­reau­cracy if it is aban­doned and thus dys­func­tional, or if you aren’t al­igned with its owner.

Conclusion

The ori­gin of bu­reau­cra­cies lies in them ex­tend­ing power and effects far be­yond what a sin­gle in­di­vi­d­ual can do. They can do so in the ab­sence of ex­pen­sive and difficult co­or­di­na­tion, or difficult to train and eval­u­ate in­di­vi­d­ual tal­ent.

Much like fac­to­ries can pro­duce cheap prod­ucts at scale with un­skil­led la­bor, dis­plac­ing crafts­men, so have bu­reau­cra­cies dis­placed lo­cal so­cial fabric as the gen­er­a­tors of so­cial out­comes.

We find our­selves em­bed­ded in a bu­reau­cra­tized land­scape. What can or can­not be done in it, is de­ter­mined by the or­ga­ni­za­tions com­pos­ing it. The con­stant drive by tal­ented in­di­vi­d­u­als to both ex­tend power and make due with un­skil­led white col­lar la­bor (a cat­e­gory that economists should rec­og­nize and talk more about) have lit­tered the land­scape with many large or­ga­ni­za­tions. Some re­main pi­loted, oth­ers are long aban­doned. Some con­tinue to perform vi­tal so­cial func­tions, oth­ers lum­ber about mak­ing life difficult.

Much as we might be­moan the very real hu­man cost bu­reau­cra­cies im­pose, they cur­rently provide ser­vices at economies that are oth­er­wise sim­ply not pos­si­ble. We must ac­knowl­edge our col­lec­tive and in­di­vi­d­ual de­pen­dence on them and plan to in­ter­act ac­cord­ingly.

There’s a large liter­a­ture on bu­reau­cra­cies, and it has a lot to say that is use­ful on the topic. Un­for­tu­nately, this post man­ages to ig­nore most of it. Even more un­for­tu­nately, I don’t have time to write a re­sponse in the near fu­ture.

For those look­ing for a more com­plete pic­ture—one that at least ac­knowl­edges the fact that most bu­reau­cra­cies are nei­ther de­signed by in­di­vi­d­u­als, nor con­trol­led by them—I will strongly recom­mend James Q. Wil­son’s work on the topic, much of which is cap­tured in his book, “Bureau­cracy.” I’ll also note that Niska­nen’s work is an im­por­tant al­ter­na­tive view, as is Si­mon’s ear­lier (ad­mit­tedly harder to read, but very use­ful) work on Ad­minis­tra­tive Be­hav­ior.

Per­row’s work, “Or­ga­ni­za­tional Anal­y­sis: A So­ciolog­i­cal View” is more dated, and I wouldn’t oth­er­wise recom­mend it, but it prob­a­bly does the best job di­rectly re­fut­ing the claims made here. In his first chap­ter, ti­tled “Per­spec­tives on Or­ga­ni­za­tions,” he ex­plains why it is un­helpful to view or­ga­ni­za­tions just as a func­tion of the peo­ple who make them up, or as a func­tion of who leads them. When I have more time, I will hope to sum­ma­rize those points as a re­sponse to this post.

I ap­pre­ci­ate the re­sponse. I poked around a bit look­ing for an on­line ver­sion of the two works and haven’t found one yet, but will con­tinue look­ing a bit and look for­ward to your even­tual sum­mary of those points.

(My own mo­ti­va­tion for cu­rat­ing this stemmed from hav­ing ob­served a cou­ple bu­reau­cra­cies form­ing in re­al­time over the past year, which did roughly match the “owned by the cre­ator” schema here, as well as en­coun­ter­ing var­i­ous other bu­reau­cra­cies that seemed to match the “un-owned” schema, which were patholog­i­cal in the ways you’d ex­pect and that matched the model in the post. The as­sump­tion I took as given in this post, al­though not speci­fied, is that most bu­reau­cra­cies you en­counter will be un-owned)

I think that most bu­reau­cra­cies are the in­evitable re­sult of growth, and even when they were ini­tially owned by the cre­ator, they don’t act that way once they re­quire more than a few peo­ple. (See my Rib­bon­farm Post, Go Cor­po­rate or Go Home)

Com­par­ing the goals of a bu­reau­cracy with the in­cen­tives and the or­ga­ni­za­tional style, you should ex­pect to find a large de­gree of over­lap for small bu­reau­cra­cies, trailing off, at best, around a dozen peo­ple, but al­most none for larger ones. This isn’t a func­tion of time since for­ma­tion, but rather a func­tion of size—larger bu­reau­cra­cies are fun­da­men­tally less re­spon­sive to owner’s in­tent or con­trol, and more about struc­ture and or­ga­ni­za­tional pri­ori­ties. As an ob­vi­ous case study, look at what hap­pened at US DHS af­ter 2002, which was cre­ated de novo with a clear goal, but it is clear in ret­ro­spect that the goal was im­me­di­ately ir­rele­vant to how the bu­reau­cracy worked.

This all makes sense, just doesn’t seem to me to be in con­flict with the OP.

I don’t know much about the US DHS, but a few ob­vi­ous things that pop into mind:

In the schema of the OP, a large bu­reau­cracy is harder to make an effec­tive bu­reau­cracy (for the same rea­son a large code­base is more likely to have bugs). Espe­cially if that bu­reau­cracy was cre­ated quickly. Even if it has a com­pe­tent owner, it’s just a harder task.

The DHS wasn’t cre­ated in a vac­uum, it was cre­ated a) as part of a weird poli­ti­cal situ­a­tion, b) I sus­pect it was also to some ex­tent cre­ated by ex­ist­ing bu­reau­cra­cies. I have lit­tle rea­son to be­lieve that the stated goal of the DHS was ever the ac­tual goal. I don’t think it “got im­me­di­ately com­pro­mised”, my guess is it was com­pro­mised from con­cep­tion. (But, I don’t know a whole lot about it and wouldn’t be that sur­prised if my guesses were off)

Some­thing that the OP doesn’t delve into much (and I do think makes it in­com­plete) is that bu­reau­cra­cies might have mul­ti­ple own­ers.

Just like a code­base is more likely to run into prob­lems if it’s be­ing cre­ated by mul­ti­ple teams with mul­ti­ple goals, esp. if those peo­ple aren’t al­igned with each other, it’d make sense for bu­reau­cracy goals to have de­grees of co­her­ence, de­pend­ing on whether they were cre­ated by a sin­gle per­son or as part of poli­ti­cal com­pro­mise.

I don’t think peo­ple should feel obli­gated to read all that’s been writ­ten on a topic be­fore post­ing their thoughts on that topic to Less Wrong, es­pe­cially if that writ­ing is not sup­ported by ran­dom­ized con­trol­led tri­als (un­sure if this is true for the writ­ings you cite).

Fair point about the bar for post­ing, but this doesn’t read like “post­ing their [ten­ta­tive] thoughts,” it reads like con­clu­sions based on ex­ten­sive re­view. As a mat­ter of good epistemics, the differ­ence should be made clearer. Similarly, if you dis­miss large parts of the liter­a­ture, it would be good to at least let peo­ple know what you think should be ig­nored, so they don’t waste their time, and even bet­ter, why, so they can de­cide if they agree.

As a side point, I think that con­sid­er­ing RCTs as a source of ev­i­dence in this do­main is a strange bar. There’s lots of case study and other quan­ti­ta­tive ob­ser­va­tional ev­i­dence that sup­ports these other ap­proaches, and spec­i­fy­ing what ev­i­dence counts is, as the phrase goes, log­i­cally rude—how would you even de­sign an RCT to test these the­o­ries?

If it’s hard to con­duct RCTs in a do­main, it’s hard to have re­li­able knowl­edge about it pe­riod. Who’s to say whether your anec­do­tal ob­ser­va­tions & con­clu­sions beat mine or some­one else’s? One way is to check whether some­one’s job is high sta­tus enough that their writ­ings on the topic can be con­sid­ered part of “the liter­a­ture”. But this is a weak heuris­tic IMO.

I strongly dis­agree. There are many do­mains where we have knowl­edge with lit­tle or no abil­ity to con­duct RCTs—ge­ol­ogy, evolu­tion­ary the­ory, as­tron­omy, etc. The mod­els work be­cause we have strong Bayesian ev­i­dence for them—as I un­der­stood it, this was the point of a large sec­tion of the se­quences, so I’m not go­ing to try to re-liti­gate that de­bate here.

I do also think that Samo has en­gaged with a large part of the liter­a­ture, and it just doesn’t come through in this post. (My model is that he has dis­missed a large part of the ex­ist­ing liter­a­ture for pretty de­cent rea­sons, but am not con­fi­dent)

Agreed—one is not ex­pected to read all that’s been writ­ten on a topic. How­ever, one should ac­knowl­edge al­ter­nate mod­els when they’re pointed out, and your sum­maries and con­clu­sions will carry a lot more weight if you can ex­plain why you pre­fer those over the other ideas.

In gen­eral we try to cu­rate things that are re­cent, so that cu­ra­tion serves in part to:

Help peo­ple keep up with what’s new and ex­cit­ing on LessWrong

Re­ward peo­ple for hav­ing pro­duced good con­tent.

But both of these have some ten­sion with a differ­ent goal, which (on the mar­gin) is good for cu­rated: to be a list of posts that stand the tests of time and are worth refer­ring to.

At the time Samo was writ­ing his se­quence, I had a hes­i­ta­tion about the en­tire thing summed up by some of Said’s com­ments: it’s fairly easy to arm­chair philoso­phize about so­ciety. This post would be bet­ter with clear ex­am­ples, and I’d still en­courage Samo to rewrite this post and oth­ers to fea­ture ex­am­ples and ev­i­dence.

Nonethe­less, all of my own ex­pe­riences with bu­reau­cracy roughly matches the de­scrip­tions given here. I re­cently ex­plic­itly linked back to this post to ex­plain a point, and more gen­er­ally, this mod­els this post play an im­por­tant role in how I think about group co­or­di­na­tion.

Robert Moses is the fa­mous mas­ter builder of New York City, be­ing re­spon­si­ble for many of the bridges, high­ways, and parks which cur­rently define the land­scape. He might be the sin­gle best ex­am­ple of the kind of thing Samo is talk­ing about—he wanted to build things, and to that end he started four au­thor­i­ties (or pub­lic benefit cor­po­ra­tions), and ran three com­mis­sions, and chaired the Coun­cil of Parks.

By the lights of the post this marks eight bu­reau­cra­cies that were si­mul­ta­neously owned and effec­tive.

The most in-depth bi­og­ra­phy of him is Caro’s The Power Bro­ker, a re­cent re­view of which is here. I also found a con­tem­po­rary ar­ti­cle from the At­lantic.

I do won­der about the ex­tent of the defi­ni­tion of ‘com­pe­tent per­son’ in this case. Among the crit­i­cisms about Moses are that he was not an ar­chi­tect, en­g­ineer, or city plan­ner by train­ing; de­spite this the things he did were widely mimicked by those pro­fes­sions in other cities.

The sense I got from The Power Bro­ker is that Moses’s work was good when do­ing good work was al­igned with his per­ceived in­ter­ests, and not when not, and it wasn’t that hard for him to find peo­ple com­pe­tent at the rele­vant tech­ni­cal dis­ci­plines when that was needed (and his abil­ity to ac­cu­mu­late power quickly ini­tially gave him a lot of slack to hire based on merit, when de­liv­er­ing a con­spicu­ously high-qual­ity product seemed like it would be helpful for ac­cu­mu­lat­ing more power).

In gen­eral it doesn’t re­ally seem to re­quire much tech­ni­cal ex­per­tise to lead a tech­ni­cal pro­ject, just a some­what difficult to main­tain mix­ture (in a poli­ti­cal con­text) of the skills nec­es­sary to ob­tain and defend re­sources, and the mind­set that still cares about get­ting the tech­ni­cal side right.

That’s true but the bu­reau­cracy isn’t what builds parks. The per­son in charge bosses around a bunch of other peo­ple com­pe­tent to de­sign and build parks, and se­cures the land and other in­puts needed to do so via poli­ti­cal pro­cesses. The bu­reau­cracy is what nor­mal­izes the ar­range­ment so that it can in­ter­face with other things in con­trol of re­source flows, e.g. so that peo­ple can get paid for re­port­ing to Moses.

Ri­tu­al­izes might be more pre­cise. Pro­vides a stereo­typed in­ter­face that plays nicely with other stereo­typed in­ter­faces. Mili­tary drill sort of serves a similar func­tion, in the face of a differ­ent kind of en­tropy than the one this is a defense against.

Here’s my vague over­all im­pres­sion from read­ing sec­ondary sources not di­rectly con­cerned with this ques­tion (prob­a­bly more noisy but also more trust­wor­thy than sec­ondary sources mak­ing a di­rect ar­gu­ment about this.)

Over­all the sense I get is that record­keep­ing and ac­tion were kept sep­a­rate in most an­cient civ­i­liza­tions, even pretty big ones—no min­utes of meet­ings or white pa­per equiv­a­lents or lay­ers of ap­proval and for­mal­ized de­ci­sion del­e­ga­tion.

It seems to me like “clay tablet” cul­tures had ex­ten­sive scribal in­sti­tu­tions, but these were mostly used for rit­u­als in tem­ple cults (of un­known func­tion), tax as­sess­ment, and cen­tral record­ing of con­tracts (the state served as a trusted third party for record stor­age and re­trieval). You’d also need lo­gis­ti­cal records for many pub­lic works pro­jects, but these were of­ten very sim­ple. Some­one would be in charge and some­times have to re­quest re­sources from other peo­ple, who would keep track of what was sent, some­times the king would want to know what was go­ing on, so they had to know the broad out­lines.

As I un­der­stand it the Per­sian em­pire’s man­age­rial and for­mal in­for­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing layer was ex­tremely lean, the king would just per­son­ally send some guy to check on a whole province, there was a courier net­work but noth­ing on the scale of USPS or even Akka­dian scribal records.

The TVA is ar­guably the most sto­ried bu­reau­cracy in the United States; it is the go-to ex­am­ple for ar­gu­ing about bu­reau­cracy it­self at the fed­eral level, for ex­am­ple in poli­ti­cal sci­ence cur­ricula. The agency was founded in 1933 to eco­nom­i­cally de­velop the greater Ten­nessee Valley re­gion. This was to be done with wa­ter man­age­ment and elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion, in par­tic­u­lar through hy­dropower.

It doesn’t match the “save the time of a com­pe­tent per­son” de­scrip­tion of pur­pose at all; eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment is not a rou­tine com­pe­tent-per­son task. It matches bet­ter the de­scrip­tion of do­ing things one per­son can­not do at all. It is worth men­tion­ing that in the 1920s Henry Ford at­tempted to build a pri­vate util­ity around the fed­eral dam in Mus­cle Shoals, Alabama, which was claimed by its pro­po­nents to serve the same goals for which the TVA was cre­ated—this was blocked by Se­na­tor Ge­orge Nor­ris of Ne­braska, who also drove the cre­ation of the TVA.

By the stan­dards Samo sets out, this would be an aban­doned and in­effec­tive bu­reau­cracy; the cre­ator is long dead, and the Great De­pres­sion long re­solved. The area it serves has elec­tric­ity, uses mod­ern agri­cul­tural prac­tices, etc. The au­thor­ity is fa­mous for hav­ing ac­cu­mu­lated a bunch of tasks un­re­lated to the origi­nal func­tion over the years; if I re­call cor­rectly at one point it was re­spon­si­ble for ap­prov­ing the speci­fi­ca­tions on what screws were to be used for all fed­eral gov­ern­ment pro­jects.

Even from the out­set it spent a lot of effort on things within the purview of its pur­pose but nom­i­nally out­side of its mis­sion. The dam man­u­fac­tured fer­til­izer, the TVA spent a lot of time and effort mod­ern­iz­ing lo­cal agri­cul­tural prac­tices, and they had a role in pro­vid­ing vac­ci­na­tions.

BUREAUCRAT: We shall find them all and de­ter­mine their wealth at once, lord. The bet­ter to en­rich you, of course.

Some­time later, a bu­reau­crat knocks on the door of a lo­cal Sog­dian.

SOGDIAN: Yes?

BUREAUCRAT: By or­der of the gov­er­nor, we are con­duct­ing a cen­sus of the city. Only of Sog­di­ans. We also re­quire a list of your pos­ses­sions, and a de­scrip­tion of how easy they would be to trans­port to the gov­er­nor’s palace.

SOGDIAN: I....see. But where are my man­ners! You, an offi­cial of the court, and me with my home a sham­bles! I am shamed to be seen in such a sorry state. You must re­turn to­mor­row and my fam­ily and I will host you a din­ner befit­ting your sta­tus!

BUREAUCRAT: But of course—it does you credit to rec­og­nize the dig­nity of an offi­cial of the gov­er­nor. I will re­turn to­mor­row.

The Sog­di­ans all exit, stage left.

BUREAUCRAT: [Re­turns] I see the home is empty, as are many oth­ers.

Some­time later, at the gov­er­nor’s palace.

BUREAUCRAT: My lord, we have con­ducted a cen­sus of the Sog­di­ans and their wealth, and found there are none in the city.

Mostly yes. Some bu­reau­cratic growth is driven by ac­tively pi­loted cen­tral­iz­ing drives, but in those cases the task at hand is in­creas­ing cen­tral power, with the nom­i­nal work be­ing pre­text.

A cou­ple peo­ple had pri­vately men­tioned con­cerns to me about whether this post should have been cu­rated, which seemed worth ad­dress­ing.

Ba­si­cally, the stan­dard for cu­rated is not, and can­not be, peer re­view.

I do per­son­ally think LessWrong should have some­thing closer to ac­tual peer re­view. I wrote about this in an­other re­cent cu­ra­tion no­tice. But if that was the stan­dard for cu­ra­tion, cu­ra­tion would fail at two of it’s main goals – pro­vid­ing peo­ple with a con­sis­tent set of posts worth read­ing, and pro­vid­ing a re­ward for LW au­thors that was a rea­son­able stan­dard to as­pire to (given that most LW au­thors are ei­ther hob­by­ists, or pro­fes­sion­als whose pri­mary fo­cus isn’t writ­ing LW ar­ti­cles)

I don’t think this post is more arm­chair-philos­o­phy-es­que than many other posts that we cu­rate, I think it just hap­pened to be of a genre that made that feel a bit more salient.

Don’t for­get that bu­reau­cracy also ex­ists as an effort to make gov’t and other or­ga­ni­za­tions more pre­dictable, and of­ten more egal­i­tar­ian. De­ci­sions such as whether you are al­lowed to build a huge house on your tiny lot are made through rules, rather than per­sonal power and in­di­vi­d­ual prefer­ence. So my neigh­bour, who has a lot of money and who is the grand­child of a former gov­er­nor, has to ap­ply to the same office, re­quest the same per­mits, provide the same doc­u­men­ta­tion, and pay the same fees, to (at least the­o­ret­i­cally) get the same an­swer as I would, the up­start nou­veau-not-that-riche. And the bu­reau­crat who ‘de­cides’ on my per­mit has to fol­low the same de­ci­sion tree as the differ­ent bu­reau­crat who de­cides on my neigh­bour’s.

This kind of pre­dictabil­ity can only oc­cur through a bu­reau­cratic sys­tem. Any­one who has lived in a coun­try where per­sonal power, class, crony­ism, caprice and cor­rup­tion make the de­ci­sions in­stead, will ap­pre­ci­ate bu­reau­cracy, de­spite how an­noy­ing and frus­trat­ing it can be.

I like the in­sight that bu­reau­cra­cies are com­posed of agents who are too in­com­pe­tent or mis­al­igned to be trusted with ac­tual power. Start­ing with the stipu­la­tion that they’re frus­trat­ingly ob­struc­tion­ist BY DESIGN is very helpful.

I think the next sec­tion vastly over­sim­plifies by as­sign­ing a few boolean di­men­sions (owned/​aban­doned, effec­tive/​in­effec­tive), when in fact all or­ga­ni­za­tions have el­e­ments in all 4 quad­rants, and both di­men­sions have de­grees that mat­ter, not just on/​off.

I think this would benefit by rec­og­niz­ing that this is mostly an spe­cific case of the prin­ci­pal-agent prob­lem, and it doesn’t mat­ter too much whether the agent is an in­di­vi­d­ual, an au­toma­ton, or a col­lec­tive bu­reau­cracy.

I like the point about the prin­ci­pal-agent prob­lem. I dis­agree only slightly, and think it would be worth dis­t­in­guish­ing be­tween in­di­vi­d­u­als and au­toma­tons on one side, and a col­lec­tive bu­reau­cracy on the other: this is be­cause the bu­reau­cracy is in fact a chain of prin­ci­pal-agent links. It seems to me a big rea­son that any kind of or­ga­ni­za­tional man­age­ment is hard is be­cause what­ever any­one tries to do, it will be me­di­ated by many prin­ci­pal-agent steps, with the pre­dictably ac­cu­mu­lated er­ror.

I have just re­al­ized I never con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­ity of an au­toma­ton (soft­ware, say) as an in­de­pen­dent link in the chain. I don’t know how cor­rect it is, but it sure makes a lot of the prob­lems I en­counter on a daily ba­sis more un­der­stand­able.

The word “al­igned” is be­ing used here in a way that seems sub­tly differ­ent than what I’ve heard be­fore. A quick defi­ni­tion and/​or link to the place(s) this us­age comes from would be re­ally use­ful.

I’m not sure there’s a sin­gle post ex­plain­ing the use of “al­igned”, but a com­mon use of the phrase on LessWrong is to mean some­thing like “hav­ing the same goals as you, or able to act as if they had the same goals as you such that you could grant them ar­bi­trary power and wouldn’t re­gret it.”